Himmler letters: 'I am travelling to Auschwitz. Kisses. Your Heini'

Newly discovered collection of letters, notes and photographs from Heinrich
Himmler shed light on private life of man who organised the Holocaust

Himmler with his daughter, Gudrun

by Damien McElroy and Inna Lazareva

6:00AM GMT 26 Jan 2014

A collection of letters, notes and photographs from Heinrich Himmler are to be published in full on Sunday, shedding light on the private life of the man who orchestrated the Holocaust.

Spanning from Himmler’s courtship of his future wife in 1927 to just a few weeks before he committed suicide in 1945, the archive published by Die Welt promises to be an unprecedented insight to the domestic relationship of the Nazi high command.

Personal archives relating to Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goerring and Joseph Goebbels have all been destroyed either by close aides or in the final onslaught on Berlin.

In excerpts released by the German newspaper on Saturday night, some exchanges between Himmler and his wife Marga contain a chilling informality.

In a July 1942 note to his wife, he wrote: “I am travelling to Auschwitz. Kisses. Your Heini.”

In July 1941 he apologised for a common forgetfulness. "I felt so sorry that I forgot our wedding anniversary for the first time. There was quite a lot going on these days." He added that "the fighting is very hard, especially for the SS".

Marga wrote to her husband shortly after hearing the news about the beginning of the attack on the Soviet Union in the morning of 22 June 1941. She also had some advice for him: "There is still one can of caviar in the fridge. Take it."

His 12-year old daughter, Gudrun, tried to warn him off. “It is terrible that we’re at war with Russia - they were our allies,” she wrote. “Still Russia is sooo big - if we take the whole of Russia, the battle will become very difficult.”

The Himmlers with Hitler at a reception (GETTY IMAGES)

Earlier letters reveal an affectionate debate over his nature, discussing if he is a “wicked and hardened heart”. In a 1928 letter, she wrote: “I am so lucky to have such a good wicked husband, who loves his wicked wife so much”.

Jacques Schuster, a German jourmalist who has spent months authenticating the material, said the documents - written in archaic German script - said the cache had been vouched for by the country’s foremost experts in the Nazi era, Michael Hollmann, head of Germany’s Federal Archives.

“It was interesting for me to see that Himmler was not Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He had components of both in his personality - he was a private man, but a mass murderer also, often in the same moment. For example, there’s some days on which he said 'ok, today, I celebrate my birthday with kids, and in the afternoon I have to go Auschwitz’,” he said.

There is nothing in the material to debunk the historical view that Himmler faithfully orchestrated the Holocaust and the excesses of the SS, he said.

Marga and Gudrun Himmler in 1945 (GETTY IMAGES)

“Of course, the whole history mustn’t be rewritten, because everything is clear. So I don’t think that now we have to write another history, that’s not the point - the point is that for the first time you have a Nazi leader and his private life,” Mr Schuster said.

“Here you have a huge amount of private letters, and you see that Himmler had a lover and kids with his lover, and so on and so forth.”

The letters reveal how Himmler sometimes shielded those closest to him from Nazi crimes. In others he and Marga communicate their virulent anti-Semitism.

The archive languished in a bedroom in Tel Aviv for years before it was bought by the family of Vanessa Lapa, an Israeli-Belgian documentary maker, in 2007.

How the material ended up in Israel is not clear. Yedioth Aharonoth, an Israeli newspaper, said Chaim Rosenthal, an Israeli memorabilia collector who acquired the material in the 1970s may have found the material at a Belgian flea market.